It was on my flight to India, returning for another year to my niche within its burgeoning private university sector, that I saw it. An abject, embarrassing film. 

Why, I wonder, do we indulge such indignities? 

BA staff interrupt the brazen clichés of a  Golden Age Lady detective, a highland chieftain, and half a dozen pseudo-Austen characters with details of our flight’s safety procedures. Such films are often annoying, but I am not so curmudgeonly as to complain about receiving information which might, however improbably, save a passenger’s life. When the national airline, however, chooses to represent Great Britain to the world with so crude a pastiche of our ever more cack-handed attempts to reimagine our own past, I do what my online life has so thoroughly conditioned me to do: cringe. 

Why, I wonder, do we indulge such indignities? 

In nice Indian hotels you will often find “Maharajah” suites and banqueting rooms. The coders and consultants of Gurgaon cybercity, the sleek commercial centre of greater Delhi, are more inclined to dream of a job in San Francisco bay than the lordship of a small patch of old Rajputana. Such titles are not to please Indians here on business, but to flatter the fancies of tourists: a little of the exotic glamour they came looking for.

It is not hard to see some initial connections here. A redcoat catching the eye of a pseudo-Austen woman might well have served in India a few years earlier, perhaps taming the Maratha under Wellesley (now Wellington), and leaving the lords of Rajputana with little choice but to accept British suzerainty. But beyond such points of plot lies a deeper, ideological connection that will crystallize over the coming generations. 

The British Empire at its apogee, so David Cannadine argues in his great study Ornamentalism, perceived itself as a splendid series of interlocking hierarchies emanating from the queen-empress. Insofar as the vast overseas domains could be seen to resemble the finely-graded society of Britain itself, they could make sense to those ruling over them. In theory, such structures provided an organic unity to a political formation comprising many millions on many continents; in practice, it was through these structures that imperial control was actually exercised, as local lords were relied upon to keep the peace and take the taxes. And of course these structures were supposed to be splendid, so that the pacified and tax-yielding millions might be assured that British rule was itself a thoroughly splendid thing. 

So the pseudo-Austen landed gentleman — rising, according to a tradition invented in 1995, sodden from his artificial lake — came to be perceived as a parallel to the princes and hereditary land-owners of India, as well as to sheiks, chiefs, and sultans from across the earth. Each enjoyed a distinctive dignity and splendour, and each owed the same loyalty to the same universal sovereign. 

One of Cannadine’s goals, intimated in his title, was to complicate a narrative introduced by Edward Said. Orientalism had stressed the construction of the East as an other to the West, by exaggerating differences; Ornamentalism recovers the ways in which the British Empire constructed its provinces as a mirror to the metropole, by emphasising similarities. However close the analogy in ceremonial role, though, an elephant is different from a carriage, and those accustomed only to carriages are bound to find an elephant exotic. Crucial to the role of both, moreover, is sheer glamour. And so any system of distinctively-splendoured hierarchies is inevitably also one pervaded with exotic glamour. 

Exotic glamour sells. It could sell specific goods, as with Leo Amery’s Empire Marketing Board, and of course it could sell the idea of Empire itself, and all that it entailed. Even now, with the tumult of the British Empire long dead and its shouting half-forgotten, the old titles of its native princes are still selling Indian hotels to the West. Since Said’s writing, it has become customary for intellectuals following him to notice and lament instances in which their own culture continues to perform otherness for the western gaze.

But what’s exotic is a relative matter. Abstracting from the extent of an audience’s familiarity with either, the functional analogy between provincial elephant and metropolitan carriage remains. The old British social order, the anchoring hierarchy in which the whole empire once symbolically cohered, has receded from memory. The world’s imperial metropole, meanwhile, has receded further west. The glamour of that faded hierarchy is now exotic to all: to the British ourselves, who have sloughed it off slowly over the past century; to the ascendant Americans, who made the first decisive break from it in 1776; and to the many peoples of the world who have broken with it in the years since. 

Britain now performs its own otherness for the content-hungry, screen-fixated gaze of the 21st century

Exotic glamour sells. BA is using it to sell flights. Wessie de Toit has explained how it was used to market both Harrod’s and the vicious abuser who owned it. It has been used by the Conservative Party to sell a political settlement largely invented by New Labour in the 1990s. Witness Rory Stewart, who in his time has been both governor in Mesopotamia and tutor in the Royal Household, recently humiliated by his public failure to scry the soul of the new metropole; and Lord Cameron, an old Etonian grandee who has conducted foreign policy from the upper house as if Africa were still to be scrambled for. Most famously, it is used by the British entertainment industry to get its “content” playing on the world’s devices (“The painting! It moves!” exclaims a suspiciously French-looking lady to her flight attendant, thereby evoking an ancient Scottish public school invented, once again, in the 1990s). Britain now performs its own otherness for the content-hungry, screen-fixated gaze of the 21st century. 

Fitting punishment, perhaps, for a nation which once used its warships to impose a volatile combination of global social hierarchy and global market economy upon the world. But it certainly is a punishment, and a self-inflicted one. The pomp of Curzon and Disraeli is one with the — French, ironically — Mandate for Syria and Lebanon. We should not be stuck parroting the scripts they set down for anyone’s applause, our own included. We should not stoop to such wretched pantomime of a now poorly-recollected past. It is not dignified; it ought not to be indulged. But, alas, it makes us money, and Britain’s recollection of how else to do so is, like His Majesty’s Exchequer, rather poor.